I am needing to cross a dry wash on my N scale RR I am building. Here is what I have to work with;
I would like for the tracks to be fairly close to the river. I am modeling in N scale around 1880 to about 1900. I am thinking of a wood trestle, but would like to have a slight curve in it. The tracks will continue on to cross the other set of tracks comming out of the rock tunnel. Any suggestions would be appriciated. Thanks, Mike
I think a trestle is a perfect solution. From the size of the feature, it appears that the runoff into the river would be slight; so I don’t think you’d need to modify a typical trestle design to account for large quantities of rushing water.
Ed
A wood pile trestle would be typical for the timeframe you are talking about.
Maybe something like this:
For your era, a wood trestle is the way to fly - with this joker in the deck. Build the bents parallel to the anticipated water flow, even if that puts them at an angle other than 90 degrees to the rails. That will minimize the stress on them when the inevitable gully-washer hits.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with deck girders on masonry piers)
Thanks for the feedback. I will see what I can do about building a trestle. I would assume there were very little (if any) concrete back then. Mike
Even today, the heavily used lines (it’s mostly 2 parallel, not double, tracks along west bank of Fountain Creek) between Colorado Springs and Pueblo have many short wood trestles crossing the dry washes that feed into the creek. Most of these are presently ballasted, decked, wood pile trestles. The washes are almost always dry except immediately after heavy thunder or snow storms.
just my observations
Fred W
Mike, we have a lot of them thar dry washes out here in the far, far, reaches of the wild, wild west. Some are quite shallow while others are deeper. Most of the shallow ones are crossed with pile trestles while the deeper ones–which also tend to be somewhat wide–are crossed untilizing framed trestles. Sometimes the shallow washes will be crossed on a fill with some sort of (usually concrete) culvert at the bottom.
Go to www.blairline.com/bridges/ and gander at what they have to offer in N-Scale pile trestles.
As a matter of interest I have a sequence of 35mm slides taken 25 or so years ago showing a Santa Fe maintenance crew using a small crane to clear debris from the upstream side of one of these concrete culverts on the line southeast of Wickenburg.